Welcome to Check Your Shelf. This week’s post is going to be a spring cleaning of sorts, where I consolidate the many (MANY) book list resources I’ve saved over the last month and a half.

Update your collections, use them as springboards for your next set of displays, or just share them with patrons.

Genre-Specific Lists

9 books that combine the gothic and the glamorous. 22 books to read after you finish Fourth Wing. 5 gripping thrillers about parents searching for missing children. The most binge-worthy Valentine’s Day romances. 10 great gothic thrillers to keep you up at night. 5 unexpectedly upbeat works of SFF. 6 SFF stories about grief and bereavement. Art world mysteries from contemporary writers and Golden Age greats. 8 of the best cold case mystery novels. 5 great romances in SFF books. 8 funny murder mysteries to make you die laughing. Cryptid horror novels for monster fans. 8 of the greatest grimdark fantasy novels.

Stories by BIPOC & LGBTQ+ Authors*

*ALL of your displays should feature books by BIPOC and LGBTQ+ authors, regardless of the subject matter, but if you’re looking to create a display that specifically centers the stories of marginalized people, these lists can help.

Children’s books that celebrate Muslim culture. 6 of the best LGBTQ+ YA enemies-to-lovers romance novels. 7 smart and hilarious books that satirize race. 5 underrated speculative fiction novels by Black authors. 5 books where Black women are doing the most. Your reading list for Black History Month and beyond. 10 modern takes on traditional Latin American folktales. 8 queer retellings of classic stories. 9 fantastic Black romance novels.

Miscellaneous Ideas

20 books you never want to end. 7 books where real estate drives the plot. 16 of the best books about music from the last decade. 5 novels with tantalizing anti-heroes. 20 books to read in a weekend. 9 haunting books about Catholicism. 5 decluttering books to help you bring order to chaos. 8 contemporary novels with omniscient narrators. 5 nature-centric books. 20 books you won’t believe are debuts. 9 books that take you inside the entertainment industry. 10 novels that showcase the rich literary culture of the Middle East. 10 Washington DC books that aren’t about politicians. 6 memoirs about motherhood. Reading recs if you loved The God of the Woods.5 fabulous nonfiction books about SFF.

So now that your display schedule has been set for the rest of the calendar year, which one are you looking forward to the most?

As a chronically ill teen, I didn’t see myself in books. Every protagonist was beautiful, talented, and able-bodied, and I struggled to relate to such “perfect” characters. But these days, more and more disabled literature is coming out for kids and teens. Young people from a wide range of disabilities have the opportunity to see themselves in the pages of a book.

This week, let’s look at a few nonfiction books for kids and teens.

Disability Visibility (Adapted for Young Adults): 17 First-Person Stories for Today edited by Alice Wong In this young adult adaptation of Disability Visibility, editor Alice Wong presents 17 essays from disabled, chronically ill, Deaf, and neurodivergent authors. This collection gives disabled teens a chance to see themselves in a way they may not have been able to before. Nondisabled readers will gain insight into what it’s like to live with a wide range of disabilities. Disabled people have their own histories, cultures, and movements, which deserve to be celebrated.

A Face for Picasso: Coming of Age with Crouzon Syndrome by Ariel Henley Henley and her twin sister were born with Crouzon Syndrome, a condition where the bones of the skull fuse too early. From an early age, Henley and her sister had numerous surgeries to try to “fix” their appearance. Henley kept waiting for the surgery that would give her the face she had always imagined for herself. Maybe then the other kids wouldn’t make fun of her. But as time passes, she begins to realize that the importance of self-acceptance and self-love are more important than strangers’ opinions.

More people are tuned in to what’s happening in public libraries and public schools than ever before. This is a good thing and it is also long overdue. Many have been shouting about this from the rooftops and from the streets for years.

This tuning in means that the continuing onslaught of awful library bills being proposed across various U.S. states is getting more attention. Again, a great and beyond necessary thing. But with the kind of reception and blasting that librarian criminalization bills are seeing on social media and in the broader media, it’s worth noting that none of these bills are new. Are they connected to what was laid out in Project 2025? Absolutely. However, these bills began long before Project 2025 was spelled out because we, as Americans, have been living the Project 2025 playbook since at least 2021.

Here’s the thing: there is not obscenity in these institutions. Obscenity is defined by the three-part Miller Test:

whether the average person applying contemporary community standards would find the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; andwhether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

Key phrase repeated twice in the Miller Test is “as a whole.”

Welcome to Today in Books. In this weekend edition, a look at all the news Book Riot covered this week.

Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

24 New York Times-Recommended Fiction Books for Spring

Spring is right around the corner! Time to make some decisions about which books you’re going to take outside while you breathe in that fresh, verdant air. If you need an assist with your seasonal TBR, The Times has a list of 24 novels to look forward to. Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games prequel, Sunrise on the Reaping, is bound to be a bestseller, I’m looking forward to reading Tilt by Emma Pattee (full disclosure, I know her, but as you can see I’m not the only one excited about this book), The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones is also on this horror fan’s list, as are Ocean Vuong’s much-anticipated The Emperor of Gladness, and Flirting Lessons by Jasmine Guillory. This list is a great reminder that we’re set up for a sensational season of reading.

We Need Diverse Books Inaugural Reading Day!

Well this is the fun and uplifting news I needed at the end of an exhausting week. The esteemed and hardworking team over at We Need Diverse Books is organizing a day to celebrate diverse books and reading. Readers are encouraged to pick up books by people from marginalized communities on April 3rd. As many voices from the WNDB team, including Dhonielle Clayton (Blackout) and Roxane Gay (Bad Feminist), message, it’s important to make sure diverse books are on those shelves because everyone stands to benefit from reading books that represent the underrepresented. WNDB will be posting resources on how to find diverse books and will provide a diverse book to an underresourced school for every $10 donated. Schools and readers could use all the help they can get these days. Check out this article for more information on why diverse books are important and how you can participate.

I am an indoorsy person who has nevertheless fallen in love with nature writing. It started with Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which detailed a year in the author’s life of living off the land. I ate up her descriptions of seed packets and seasonal planting despite the fact that, in my own home, I am known to have a black thumb.

My love only intensified with Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, a memoir about living in reciprocity with the land and with each other. I loved it so much that I read it twice, followed by a number of other outdoorsy reads.

As much as I admired the authors and their dedication to honoring the land, I felt apart from them. I knew I would never be able to walk the trails near my home without being terrified of wasps… would never be able cultivate a bountiful herb garden without my husband’s help… would never be able to keep the spider plants in the herb window alive when he went out of town.

Tomorrow is International Women’s Day and here in the U.S., it’s Women’s History Month all March long. In that spirit, let’s spotlight some graphic novels and comic books that feature fascinating, beautiful, and badass trans girls and women!

Apsara Engine by Bishakh Som This award-winning anthology collection features unnerving supernatural stories about all kinds of women as they navigate the dangers and thrills of modern life.

Bad Dream by Nicole Maines and Rye Hickman Maines portrayed Dreamer, the first trans superhero on TV, on The CW’s Supergirl. Now she has written this graphic novel about her groundbreaking character, Nia Nal, who has suddenly inherited powers she doesn’t think she was meant to have.

The Bride Was a Boy by Chii Chii tells her life story in this upbeat memoir, exploring how she was raised as a boy, transitioned into the woman she always wanted to be, and slowly fell in love with a man who adores her exactly as she is!

Enjoying what you’re reading? Support the work we do as an independent media resource by becoming an All Access member, and unlock our entire library of articles and a growing catalog of community features. Sign up now for only $6/month!

Sorting through library news (or any news, really) feels a little like sticking your hand into a pit of hungry alligators. It’s mass firings of federal workers, bad management strategies from someone who isn’t authorized to manage anything at the federal level, book ban legislation…the list goes on. I’ve waded through the chaos and found a few news stories that managed to stand out from the blaring cacophony of WTF-ery. Time to pay attention.

In a shady-ass move, the Library of Congress released a list of proposed subject heading changes on February 18th, which included changing “Mexico, Gulf of” to “America, Gulf of” and changing Denali to Mount McKinley. They also set February 18th as the deadline for public comment submissions, even though the list was only posted earlier that day. When you consider how long it normally takes to make changes to existing subject headings, this rapid turnaround is hella sus.

Hoopla Cuts Back on “AI-Generated Slop”

Hoopla has announced it will do more to prevent the spread of low-quality AI-generated books on its platform. Although the exact details of the plan are unclear, hoopla has already implemented measures like revising its collection development policy, giving librarians a way to contact hoopla directly to better manage the catalog, and removing “summary titles” from all vendors, with the exception of series like CliffNotes. This is all well and good, but considering the sheer number of low-quality and AI-generated titles already in their catalog, hoopla has its work cut out for them.

Valentine’s Day is over, which means we’re no longer in the throes of Cuffing Season. But some of us—including the characters in this book—are desperate for love all year round.

I picked up this thriller the day after Valentine’s Day, and it was the perfect post-love season read. Forget about pure love and romance. None of these characters can be trusted, there are surprises around every turn, and nothing is what it seems.

Enjoying what you’re reading? Support the work we do as an independent media resource by becoming an All Access member, and unlock our entire library of articles and a growing catalog of community features. Sign up now for only $6/month!

Cross My Heart by Megan Collins Rosie Lachlan has not had it easy. A year ago, she was dumped in her wedding dress. Then she discovered she needed a heart transplant. Now she’s got a new heart, is working at her parents’ bridal salon, and despite everything she’s been through, she still dreams of her happily ever after. Things have been tough for Rosie, but being so near death has given her a new perspective on life (and a fresh cotton candy pink hairstyle). But Rosie is the type of person who has her little fixations and obsessions. Ever since her heart transplant, she’s been obsessed with learning more about her donor. She’s convinced her heart donor was Daphne Thorne, the wife of famous author Morgan Thorne. Rosie starts to e-mail with Morgan anonymously through DonorConnect, and the more she discovers about him, the more she’s certain she is right about who her donor was. And if Rosie has Morgan’s wife’s heart, maybe she and Morgan are meant to be together.

Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month.

—Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor

From William Stixrud and Ned Johnson’s The Seven Principles for Raising a Self-Driven Child: A Workbook (Penguin Life):

Below we’ve listed some research-backed statements about what an accurate model of reality looks like:

    …

What secret desires and resentments are tucked inside the people we love? A little girl’s diary, with its tiny lock and key, testifies to the impulse to keep parts of ourselves hidden, but it’s impossible to look at a locked diary without imagining breaking it open.

What to do then, with the published diary? With its lock removed, its interior offered to the world not only as exposure but as form: a genre beholden to the insight that rises from immediacy rather than retrospection. Many writers’ diaries have been published, but far fewer have been published in their lifetimes—and none carry the singular acuity, wit, and electric grace of Helen Garner’s. An Australian national treasure known for her novels of domestic nuance and entanglement (Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach) and journalism of grand sorrow and fierce controversy (The First Stone, This House of Grief), Garner has given us diaries that read like they are inventing a new language made from utterly familiar materials: fresh, raw, vibrating with life. “Like being given a painting you love gleaming with the still wet paint,” as the writer Helen Elliott put it. They are seductively loose and nimble, delivering shards of experience rather than an overdetermined narrative, pivoting from sharpened skewers of observation (“The writers’ festival. It’s like being barbecued”) to a clear-eyed claiming of pleasure (“tear meat off a chicken and stuff it into her mouth”), swerving from deep reckonings with romantic intimacy and dissolution to sudden, perfect aphorisms hidden like Easter eggs in the grass: “Sentimentality keeps looking over its shoulder to see how you’re taking it. Emotion doesn’t give a shit whether anyone’s looking or not.”

The writer Catherine Lacey once brilliantly described the difficulty of writing about experiences you’re still living as “trying to make a bed while you’re still in it,” but as I read Garner’s diaries, I kept thinking that perhaps not every bed needs to be made. Sometimes we want the unmade beds, with messy sheets and sprawled out bodies stretching and spooning, the fossils of curled hairs on the pillow, the faint salt of dried sweat.

Far from reading like B-roll footage, these diaries feel magnificent and sui generis, beholden to no rhythms or logic but their own, simultaneously seductive and staggering, a blend of pillow talk, bar gossip, and eavesdropping on therapy. They offer an intoxicating, astute account of the deep emotional movements of Garner’s life over two decades— two marriages and divorces, the flowering of her literary career, and her daughter’s coming-of-age—but they always live in the weeds, built of the grain and texture of her days. No small part of their brilliance stems from their faith that there is no meaningful separation between these realms of inquiry: that reckoning with human purpose and the anguished possibilities of human love always happens within, and not above, the realm of “trivial” daily experience. Which is to say: in their form as well as their content, they reveal where meaning dwells in our lives (everywhere), and how we might excavate it. “In my heart,” Garner has said, “I always liked my diary better than anything else I wrote.”

My father has crossed many borders. Born in northern Việt Nam under French rule in 1933, he was educated in a French Catholic school. More than eighty years later, a widower, he could still sing fragments of French songs when we sat together at the dining table. The meal I could prepare which he most enjoyed was filet mignon, medium rare, with a glass of red wine. He had a cupboard full of Louis Jadot Beaujolais, for when he liked something, he bought it in bulk. When he stopped being able to eat meat and drink wine, I took the last two bottles of Louis Jadot and brought them home with me, where they remain untouched. Perhaps I will drink one when he passes away. Perhaps I will open the second decades from now and see what I remember when I taste it, even if all I will taste is spoilt wine. 

By then, my father will have long ago passed across the last border any of us will see. I know of at least two other borders that he crossed during his life. In 1954, as a newlywed at twenty-one with his seventeen-year-old wife, my father left his childhood home and moved south across the border, where Việt Nam had been partitioned into a communist north and anticommunist south following the defeat of French colonizers by Vietnamese revolutionaries. My mother’s entire family chose to leave the north, along with eight hundred thousand other Vietnamese Catholics fearing communist persecution. My father’s family chose to stay, so my father left behind his parents, his younger sister, and three younger brothers. He would not see them again for forty years. Ulysses was away from home for only twenty years. Does my father’s journey away from home and back to it four decades later deserve the name of an epic? If not, what form should my father’s story take?

The question of form and its relationship to a life lived interests me as a writer and as a border crosser, as my father’s son and as a father myself. A half century after my father left his childhood home, I visited the compound. My aunt had married and moved out long ago, but my three paternal uncles still live there, along with many of their children and grandchildren. From my youth until my visit and past then until the present, my parents have sent home money to the relatives every year to help them survive. On this visit, I gave all the adults envelopes of cash, the amounts determined by my father, and thought about what my life would have been like if my parents had never left in 1954, or in 1975, when they fled from Sài Gòn and crossed yet another border to the United States. If I am inclined to see the journeys of my parents as heroic, the writer Amitava Kumar pushes back against the praise for those who cross borders: the immigrants, the refugees, the undocumented, the expatriates, the tourists, the settlers, the conquerors. He writes that “It is not the immigrant but the ones who stay behind who are the true unvanquished.”

It is safe to say that perceptions of migrants are contradictory. In their countries of origin, they are sometimes celebrated for having embarked on adventures and sometimes criticized as having abandoned their homes. In the countries of their arrival, they can appear as terrifying threats in another people’s history or be welcomed as fresh blood. If they face hostility and suspicion, migrants might feel the need to insert themselves into their new nation’s chronicles of conquest. The migrant’s heroism can then harmonize with their host nation’s self-image, as well as affirming that nation’s hospitality and generosity.

We are delighted to announce that Elijah Bailey will receive this year’s George Plimpton Prize and that Julien Columeau and Sana R. Chaudhry will receive the Susannah Hunnewell Prize. The prizes will be presented at our annual Spring Revel on April 1 in New York, cochaired by Laurie and Oskar Eustis and MCed by Lena Dunham. We’ll also be honoring Anne Carson with the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement in literature, which will be presented by Ben Whishaw. Prizewinners are selected by the editorial committee of the Review’s board of directors.

The George Plimpton Prize, awarded annually since 1993, honors our founding editor’s commitment to championing new talent by recognizing an emerging writer of exceptional merit published in the magazine during the preceding year. Previous recipients include Jesse Ball, Amie Barrodale, Emma Cline, Isabella Hammad, Yiyun Li, and Ottessa Moshfegh.

Elijah Bailey’s story “Social Promotion,” published in issue no. 247 (Spring 2024), follows a girl who performs in an original, half-improvised school play written for her Great Black Women of History class. Bailey was a John and Renée Grisham Fellow in fiction at the University of Mississippi. The Review’s publisher, Mona Simpson, writes:

“Social Promotion” by Elijah Bailey is laugh-out-loud funny, narrated by Derajanae in a voice full of comedy, pathos, and joy. She is at an awards ceremony at a “last-chance alternative school” in a former office space with “one of them spinning doors you can trap people in,” sitting behind her teacher who makes “a bigger deal out of everything than it is” and next to her mother and baby sister, Racey, who wears a onesie with cars on it. Derajanae has written a play to be performed at the ceremony, but first she has to listen to a boy who can’t read call out the names of the winners. “Sound it out,” she thinks. “Guess better.” He has yet to say her name.

Derajanae got kicked out of her last school “for fighting too good,” and she’s due at the park for a fight right now—but first she has to star in her play as Sojourner Truth. “Me and Miss Marie had to compromise on the play,” she says. “She ain’t want no foul language and no making light of violence. During rehearsal she kept pecking at it and pecking at it until it was only kind of mine.” We watch the play unfold as a raucous farce; naturally, Derajanae manages to make it more hers. During the applause, she thinks, “I had done something big and good, and my ears were burning hot.” But the story isn’t over yet. Keeping the reader in what feels like a gentle suspense until the end, Bailey has the last word, a surprise that resonates in layers—it’s first funny, then more and more profound.